


but i think it's here to stay

by sansbanshees



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Coffee, F/M, Not So Chance Meetings, There will probably be smut eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-23 22:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7482147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sansbanshees/pseuds/sansbanshees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karen and Frank, after the finale.</p><p>Or</p><p>A series of loosely connected kastle one shots in no particular order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but i think it's here to stay

It’s been months since Karen saw him last. Months since the night she ran with the other hostages, since she looked up and saw him on that roof thinning out Daredevil’s— _Matt’s_ —opponents.

He saw her too. She isn’t sure whether or not that means anything anymore. Whether it ever did in the first place.

_You do this, and I am done._

She meant it. She still does, sometimes. Less as the days go on. Mostly, she misses him for reasons she doesn’t fully understand yet.

Evidence of his work is everywhere. The hits are smaller, still messy but lower profile, all that rage still present, but somehow colder than before. Calculated. If anyone suspects that he’s still alive, that he’s behind them, they don’t talk about it. Matt knows, or she assumes he does—they don’t exactly talk much anymore—but as far as the world is concerned, Frank Castle died in that explosion. Case closed. Story over.

She wonders if he still walks around like a living canvas of bruises. If he still wears them like tattoos across his face, etched in purples and yellows, last night’s damage piled right on top of what he took the night before.

She also wonders if he’s okay. He can’t be, people who do what he does are categorically not okay, but she can’t hear a gunshot in the distance without wondering if it’s him. Which side of it he’s on. Hoping it’s not the side that ends with him dead. That probably says something about her that she’s not ready to look at just yet. Most people run the other way when they hear gunshots. Karen, she _worries_ , and not for the reasons she should.

_Why do you care so much about Frank Castle?_

Because he’s not the monster everyone thinks he is, or even the one he’s trying like hell to become. Because he never lied to her. Because she _can_ imagine him singing along to all kinds of ridiculous songs and she’s never felt safer than she does with that damn tape playing.

If she ever sees him again, she thinks maybe she’ll give it to him so he can listen to something other than gunfire and police scanners.

  


* * *

  


As it happens, she doesn’t have the tape handy when he comes back into her life. It’s in her car and she decided to walk.

It’s just another Saturday and Karen’s in line at her usual haunt for coffee. She feels him before she sees him, a change in the air that makes goosebumps rise on the backs of her arms. She turns, uncertain what to expect. Danger probably, considering what her life is these days, and true to her instincts, there he is in line behind her, baseball cap pulled low to hide his face. 

Only one side of his face is bruised this time, livid purple splotches from brow to jaw, a cut across the crooked bridge of his nose.

“Frank?” She can’t help the wonder in her voice, seeing him in such a mundane place. Part of her wonders if they’re about to be shot at. That should probably concern her more than it actually does.

If he’s surprised to see her, it doesn’t register. He simply nods, a faint smile flickering briefly to life. “Ma’am.”

The barista is calling her up to order. Karen looks at Frank for a moment, then lifts her hand in a gesture that’s vaguely commanding. “Stay. Please.” She turns around long enough to order her usual, thinks better of it and adds a black coffee too. It’s probably pointless. She doesn’t expect him to be there when she turns around because that’s what he does, he disappears.

Not this time. This time he stays, a surprise more pleasant than it should be. He follows her to the side of the counter to wait for her order, standing close at first but he inches away before long, as if he thinks he’s not really allowed to be in her space. She slides closer when her order is up. His shoulders tense and shift back, but he doesn’t move away as she leans in front of him to grab both cups.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he tells her, taking the cup from her hand anyway when she offers it. Whether he means buying it or picking it up for him makes no difference. Her answer is the same.

“I wanted to.” She shrugs. Not because it doesn’t matter, but maybe to make it less than it is. Maybe it’ll happen more often, this way. Maybe she won’t have to wonder if he’s okay. Maybe she’ll get to know firsthand. “Stick around and drink it with me and we can call it even.”

He eyes her skeptically. “You sure about that?”

_You’re dead to me._

She can’t blame him for hesitating.

“Yeah.” She nods, her smile small, but hopeful. “I am.”

He smiles back, but it’s all too brief. “How about I walk you where you’re going instead?”

“It’s not too far out of your way?”

He shakes his head. “No.” 

“You don’t know where I’m going,” she points out, unsurprised that he doesn’t bother to ask. It’s possible that wasn’t an entirely fair question on her part.

It takes him aback, her observation. His expression falters in momentary surprise, but it recovers to a quiet sort of acceptance in the space of a heartbeat. “Doesn’t change my answer.”

And it wouldn’t. She doesn’t even have to ask herself whether or not that’s true. On some level, she’s understood for awhile now that there are few things Frank Castle won’t do for her. One of them, the most important thing, it matters, she can’t pretend that it doesn’t and she won’t do either of them the disservice of downplaying it, but… She misses him. Even now. He’s maybe half here at best, the other half poised to walk, to run, one wrong move and he’s a ghost for good. She doesn’t want that.

Besides, he sought her out for a reason. She refuses to believe this was a chance meeting. It’s not that she’s overlooking the killing, she’s really not, just—putting it on the back burner, for now. Letting it be what it is. If sticking around is on the list of things he’ll do for her, there will be time for that later. 

The walk for a block in silence, shoulders bumping occasionally as they shift back and forth to make room for people passing by. Frank slows abruptly with a touch to her arm to let her know he’s dropping back, making room for the double stroller coming the opposite way. It makes her shiver, that touch. How aware she is of his warmth behind her. The way he _does_ things like this, ducking out of the way like it’s second nature to make it easier for a frazzled mother to pass by so she doesn’t have to ask for the room in the first place.

This is what Karen misses, these pieces of him glimpsed more often than he'll ever admit. This is what’s worth preserving, or trying to, as much as he’ll let her talk him into it. If he’ll let her anymore. She hasn’t known him long but she likes to think that she knows him well, that she’s studied him carefully enough to see the fundamental core of who he is. That there’s still so much more to him than just the Punisher.

That’s there too. It always will be. But it’s not all there is.

The span of weeks that found her thinking maybe she really was wrong about him were misery and she can’t go back to that. She won’t. He means something to her that she still can’t articulate and if he can’t stare down Kandahar, if he’s not ready for answers, that’s—not _fine_ , not really, but it has to be for now. She can find answers. She can do that for him. For his family. And if she’s honest, for herself. It was never just a want, but a need, the insistent necessity of it hammering right alongside the beat of her heart.

“Sorry,” Frank says. For the shiver, she assumes. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

She turns to glance up at him as he reappears at her side.

“You didn’t.”

And he doesn’t. She’s not sure that he even can anymore. Not when she’s seen the worst of him.

He doesn’t smile exactly, but his mouth twitches back as if he’d like to. “Know where we’re going yet?”

She was heading in to her office at The Bulletin, but it can wait. She’s more interested in why he’s here. “That depends.”

“Yeah?” He pauses long enough for a swig of coffee, eyes narrowing with interest. “On what?”

“What this is. What you’re doing here.” She stops walking, squares her shoulders and turns to face him. “If you were waiting for the right time to tell me, this is it. I know it wasn’t coincidence, running into you like this.”

“No, it wasn’t.” He almost sounds like he regrets that. Like he wishes it could be. That makes two of them. “You, uh, you go around kicking a lot of hornets’ nests, ma’am.” And he smiles at that, something vaguely proud in the way he looks at her. “Those hornets, they don’t like you much.”

So someone’s not happy with her. Maybe following her. Gunning for her. It’s—alarming, but not surprising. “So this is, what? A heads up?”

“Something like that, yeah.” He’s trying to keep his tone even, but there’s no mistaking the flicker of fury in his eyes. “Found a guy scoping out your place last night. Wasn’t subtle, this prick.”

_Wasn’t._

She shouldn’t ask. She’s not sure that she even wants to, but if this is a continuing danger, she needs to know. “Did you—”

“He’s not gonna be coming by again,” Frank interrupts before she can go any further. “Look, just… don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”

She opens her mouth to fire back, but he’s not exactly wrong. She doesn’t want to know any more than that, and not because it makes her an accessory—or not just because of that.

“Okay,” she says instead. It’s unnerving, nobody wants a target on their back, but she would rather know and Frank, at least, respects her enough to tell her. She appreciates that. Others might not extend her the same consideration. “I’m guessing there’ll be more of them?”

“I’d say that’s a safe bet.” He drains the last of his coffee, a scrunch in his nose as he swallows it down. “You still have that gun?”

Karen arches a brow. “What do you think?”

“Good.” He nods in approval, finger tapping against the empty cup. “Keep it on you. No shortcuts through alleys, no going down empty streets.”

Her mouth quirks up in a half-smile. “Not my first rodeo.”

“Yeah, I know it isn’t.” He smiles wryly. “You’ll do all right.”

“So what happens now?” She tucks her hair back behind her ear. “Do you disappear on me again?”

He doesn’t answer right away. She isn’t going to let herself take it as a bad sign.

“That what you want?” he finally asks. Something shifts in the air with the question, the finality of what this could be weighing heavy.

“No.” She doesn’t have to think it over. She doesn’t want to. The alternative is unthinkable. “Don’t do that. Not again.”

She waits for him to backpedal, tell her what a bad idea this is, that she needs to stay away from him.

“You got a pen?” he asks instead.

Karen blinks.

“Yeah, I—” She turns, digs in the front pocket of her bag until she produces one. “Here.”

Frank tosses his empty cup into the trash can beside them and takes the pen from her hand.

And then he takes her hand and turns it over, palm up.

“You see anything, hear anything, you need help,” he says, scribbling down a line of numbers across her skin, “you call that number, okay?”

It takes everything she has not to snort a good-natured laugh at the gesture. “I could have just entered that in my phone, you know.”

“Huh.” He presses the pen back into her hand with a small smile. “Sorry. Guess I’m old fashioned.”


End file.
